After delighting Warner Bros, but surprising most film-goers, by awarding Batman a 12A certificate, it has now decided to allow the release of an uncut version on DVD of a seventies cause célèbre, Caligula. The British Board of Film Classification is having a perplexing summer. While it may now be deemed relatively tame when compared to contemporary "hardcore" offerings, the film is entrenched in pornography's hall of fame, currently featuring among the top-five titles in the movie website, IMDb's "best adult films ever" – just below the cult classic, Deep Throat. It has, after all, remained Penthouse's most popular DVD, having sold an average of 3,000 each month since its release. In spite of the critical mauling, it played all over America, and in a Vanity Fair interview decades later, Guccione said that he was still proud of his creation. No distributors would pick up the film, so Guccione rented a theatre on Third Avenue in New York and opened it himself. He said he had wanted the epic to be about the orgy of power, not about the power of the orgy.īrass and Vidal unsuccessfully demanded to have their names taken off the credits at the time, and Guccione directed some sequences himself, with Toni Biggs, his elder daughter, contributing to the soundtrack.
Guccione's coterie then locked Brass out of the editing room in order to transform the action into something far more lascivious.Ī lengthy interview with Brass some years later catalogued his regret of what was done to the film. It was originally to be called "Gore Vidal's Caligula" but the first sign that all was not going to Vidal's plan was when Guccione hired the Italian director, Tinto Brass, whose "vision" appeared at odds with Vidal's storytelling.īrass barred Vidal from the set and changed the film's focus, after which the writer withdrew any further involvement. They did not cast aspersions on the virtuosity of its actors or its sumptuous set design – its production designer, Danilo Donati, was also behind the sets and costumes for Federico Fellini's Satyricon, Roma and Amarcord, but it was slated for its "horrific violence" and its "wall-to-wall sex scenes" as well as what some condemned as inane dialogue.įew could have imagined that Guccione's financial involvement would have affected its outcome quite so dramatically as he had already invested in critically acclaimed films such as Roman Polanski's Chinatown. When it was released, the reviews were devastating.
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